Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Has Pope Francis decontaminated the Catholic brand?

Three million. That's more than the entire population of Albania. Or Jamaica. The crowds of young people who greeted Pope Francis on Rio's Copacabana beach yesterday demonstrate his extraordinary appeal; Benedict XVI couldn't have attracted such jaw-dropping numbers. How many were devout participants in World Youth Day is another question: one poll claimed that 65 per cent disagreed with Catholic teaching on birth control. But if Francis was attracting "cafeteria Catholics" or non-believers, then he'd surely say: so much the better.

The spectacle of a Pope visiting a muddy Brazilian slum in order to scold the rich has delighted most Catholics. Some traditionalists are less easily won over, however. They distrust a humility that's expressed in soundbites and photo-ops. Benedict, they point out, is just as humble a man. When Francis said last week that the Catholic Church was "perhaps too cold, too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas," they take it personally. Some of them will not be pleased by the Pope's statement, on the plane back from Brazil, that "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?"

Actually, I don't think the Pope intended to criticise his predecessor, and he is not changing Catholic teaching on the sinfulness of homosexual acts. But there's no doubt that he's presenting it in a more relaxed manner, and he's moving the Church away from its recent position – formulated amid panic over sex abuse – that celibate gay men pose too much of a risk to be ordained. That was a ridiculous and insulting stance which, if it were enforced retrospectively, would leave parishes all over the world without a priest.

As for the liturgy, there's no doubt that Francis's style is more informal than Benedict's, and he isn't a fan of the beautiful classical rubrics of the pro-conciliar Church. That's a shame and it's worrying to learn that he has imposed restrictions on the celebration of the Old Rite on a Franciscan community that had adopted it wholesale.

On the other hand… what if Francis succeeds in decontaminating the Catholic brand?

Sorry about the jargon, but if Catholicism really were a brand, ad agencies wouldn't be fighting for the account right now. You can sum up the reason for the Church's global unpopularity in one sentence. Catholic priests abused children and Catholic bishops covered up their crimes.

We can argue until the cows come home about what percentage of priests were involved, how many of them are long dead, whether their offences were technically paedophile, whether local dioceses or the Vatican are more to blame for the cover-ups, and how many clergy were falsely accused. The fact remains: the Church betrayed children on an unimaginable scale.

The era of large-scale, institutional child abuse is now over, I believe – thanks in part to measures taken by Benedict XVI. But the media never gave him any credit for his lonely campaign (while still Cardinal Ratzinger) against the "filth", as he put it, tolerated by senior prelates. By the time he was Pope it was too late to shift public opinion. He was unfairly seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Francis, on the other hand, possesses a charisma so intense that some observers consider him the solution. That's naive. There's a danger that some of the anti-Ratzinger old guard who flourished under John Paul II, who were in positions of power when the most shameful crimes were covered up, will try to appropriate, and quietly frustrate, the Pope's reform of the Curia.

That said, my first reaction to the aerial shot of Copacabana beach was to think: this is perhaps the moment when the stereotype of the Catholic Church as a nest of lying hypocrites and child abusers will finally begin to fade. Thank God.

It is one thing for the Church to face hostility because it challenges fashionable and comfortable ways of life; quite another for it to become synonymous with evil. If Pope Francis can create an atmosphere where Catholics are judged by their actions today rather than by the abhorrent crimes of a minority of their clergy, then even the most staunch traditionalist will be in his debt.